From: Asmus Freytag (asmusf@ix.netcom.com)
Date: Mon Apr 14 2008 - 14:54:30 CDT
On 4/14/2008 11:00 AM, JFC Morfin wrote:
>
>> The French version is a translation of the English version and - as
>> such -
>> it is not subject to the same level of scrutiny.
>
> This is a mistake.
> (1) a version is not a translation. It is a version. If its content is
> non reviewed translation the Chair is at deep fault, because he
> endorses texts he does not know, and because most probably (this is
> the purpose of the bilingual publication) there are unclarities which
> have been found in the English text that have been translated in a way
> the English has not benefited.
That's the reason people actually familiar with the way 10646 is produce
keep commenting on your claims: There's no substantive endorsement by
the working group of the contents of the translations, therefore,
calling these versions is an inherent misrepresentation.
> (2) This is why I say that - if the translators are good, and I
> suppose they are - the French version is necessarily more advanced
> than the English version. And this is abnormal.
In the case of 10646, the character names in the translations are not
subject to the same stability guarantees and restrictions as those in
the original - making the translated names not suitable as formal
identifiers. While this may make them more user-friendly to human
readers, the necessarily have a different status.
>> Since it cannot have any
>> normative information beyond that of the English version, it would be
>> wrong
>> to use it as the base for any further translation, because this could
>> lead
>> to errors in interpreting interpretations.
>
> French and English versions are legally equally normative.
Well, they can't be used that way in practice, because of the fact that
"English" character names are guaranteed to be suitable as identifiers,
while translated character names are not so guaranteed. For example, the
set of allowed characters in the names is carefully restricted in 10646,
so that it does not contain characters that cannot be readily used in
identifiers in most programming languages (after removing/substituting
space and '-'). The French names use single quotes and other features
which prevent these names from being readily used as identifiers in many
if not most such languages.
This is not a defect of the French translation, as 10646 specifies that
certain restrictions don't apply to translations, but it prevents
translations from being 'equally normative' unless they also contain the
English character names, for example.
The English character names, are acknowledged to be formal identifiers
of a somewhat arbitrary, but stable nature. They are known to not alway
represent the most user-friendly designation of a character, and in
fact, one would need to use a regional flavor of English to get the most
user-friendly designation for certain characters, because usage and
conventions disagree.
The problem is real, but thankfully rather limited, however, there have
been occasional suggestions that the formal nature of the character
names should be recognized by creating a translation of character names
for average English speaking users; to be used when usage as identifiers
is not intended. However, so far, the problem has been handled by
providing various user-friendly aliases (in the Unicode Standard).
A./
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